I would not bother moving the 120 GB Barracuda 7200.7 drive from the old PC. You could get a new 2 TB version for $110.

Your existing case should accept the CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo. Some cases cannot accommodate the height of a 120mm tower cooler. Something like the GeminII S524 can work in that situation (though it has its own clearance problems with super-tall RAM heatsinks). The end of the Newegg TV video shows the Hyper 212 side-by-side with the GeminII S524.

You already bought the motherboard+CPU? Now it is a race against time. Waiting for the video card to come down in price while this stuff sits there doing nothing is just bad. Get a temporary card or use an existing one for now.

With 8 GiB DIMMs, your motherboard could hold up to 32 GiB of memory. Note that Windows 7 Home Premium only supports up to 16 GiB. If you want to use more, you'll have to get the Professional or Ultimate versions. You could find it easier to achieve the most extreme overclock with two DIMMs than with four. I wouldn't be too concerned about that.

The down-side is that the higher-density DIMMs are about 40% more expensive for 16 GiB of PC3-12800 at 9-9-9-24 and 1.5 V. That particular kit is out of stock at Newegg, but you could find it at other etailers.

Your Radeon HD5850 should still perform tolerably in most games at 1920x1200 if you decide to wait until Fall to upgrade. You may occasionally find yourself running with just 2X AA to maintain frame rates.

I was there just this sat.Picked up a Gateway slim tower with H61 sandy bridge @2.4ghz celeron 4gb ram 500gb HD for 209$!!!Needed to replace my old am2 1.5ghz dual core zino HTPC. Picked up a low profile silent HIS 6450 for 44$ was goin to return it if the HD2000 IGP was good enough...but it was a little flaky.

Its a speed demon surfs web and everything HTPC wise i think almost as fast as my 2600k rig.Best 260 dollar pc i ever used.

2. My graphics card didn't like the new intake fan encroaching on its territory. Thought of moving the graphics card to the x8 slot. Finally, ended up adding the fan to the Hyper 212 Evo. It has two fans now (push-pull).

3. Thanks to Tom's, TR, and a lot of other hardware forums, it seems every build problem has already been faced and can be resolved with a simple Google search. My searches include - Is it ok for the Hyper 212 heatsink to move after installation (it is ok if it moves a little bit), difference between PCI-e x16 vs v8 (a few frames per second, at best), difference between SATA 6 Gbps vs 3 Gbps cables (no such thing really), CPU LED lights up and system shuts off (see next).

4. When I first turned the system on, the CPU LED came on (red) and then it powered down. After reading different forum posts about bad processor or motherboard, it seems the problem was that the 8-pin EATX 12 V power plug was not connected. The user guide noted that under 'Do not forget...', but I still managed to.

5. Received a CPU fan speed error with multiple beeps. It seems the Cooler Master fan was spinning under 600 RPM. Changed the minimum limit in the UEFI and this was resolved.

6. As CampinCarl noted, adding the SSD makes a lot of difference. My power on to login screen was a little longer (is there a way to make the whole POST process faster), but everything else was snappy after that.

7. 4 fans running at full speed is very loud. After tweaking Q-Fan and Fan Xpert 2, the fans are barely audible now. Fan Xpert 2 cannot independently control the two CPU fans, so I might connect one of them to a Chassis Fan connector.

8. The system started at a temperature of 37 C. Never seen such low temperatures before!

9. Still trying to understand overclocking. Tried the UEFI OC Tuner and AI Tuner, but unable to get the max out of stock voltage. AI Tuner increased the voltage from around 1.014 V to 1.070 V and increased CPU frequency by a couple hundred MHz. Manually increasing multipliers past 40, with stock voltage is resulting in BSODs. Need to do more reading here.

integer wrote:Well. the build is complete finally and am posting from the new machine.

Congratulations! Enjoy your new hardware.

integer wrote: 1. The instructions on the Hyper 212 Evo are poorly written.5. Received a CPU fan speed error with multiple beeps. It seems the Cooler Master fan was spinning under 600 RPM. Changed the minimum limit in the UEFI and this was resolved.

The instructions aren't great, but the diagrams are good. I found that the fan on the GeminII-S524 would start out around 480 rpm before settling in at about 520 rpm to keep the i5-3570K cool. I lowered the UEFI's fan monitoring alarm from 600 rpm to 400 rpm and it's good.